Fear

or Things You Can Do With Fear.

Sometimes I find people hard to be around and it isn’t easy to work out why. Often I find a feeling that leads me to think of what’s occurring between myself and them as not quite real – that there’s something cartoonish happening, almost. The feeling is of fear, a particular feeling of fear, in the way that the bark on various kinds of tree can be so very different.Why am I’m thinking of fear and bark together like this?I thrive on this kind of question. It tends to take me to places that my thoughts don’t naturally go. So I think about how, when I was very young, my father used to have a dog that terrified me, that barked a lot, and that back then I often thought about my father as if he were a cartoon. As I got older I started seeing him as he was, but he still seemed to think about me in ways that never seemed to extend beyond something very basic, like a sketch of me he’d drawn once, at a distance. There was something very true about it and something extremely limited. I might as well have been frozen in space: easy to remember and indestructible.The fear that I feel around people when I start sensing something cartoonish is going on (and cartoons allow for some very disturbing thoughts to be had amusingly, harmlessly and without getting into what isn’t a cartoon: flesh and blood for example, someone or something so fragile they are real) reminds me that I, the real me, might be the last person actually on someone else’s mind. I suspect that in some way they are very scared and might prefer not to imagine me as more than a glyph.Who I am to them remains to be seen … but I feel a degree of confidence that I’m trying to remain open to who they could be.

Note: The dog was given away. The first time, I was told by my mother, the owners returned him because he seemed to be barking at ghosts.

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One Reply to “Fear”

This was really interesting. While I wouldn’t particularly describe my thoughts as ‘cartoonish,’ I can have a very detached view of certain situations. Maybe that’s down to a combination of nurture and nature. I don’t know. I also experience a lot of derealization when I am going through a bad patch with my illness.